This Everyman Library’s Pocket edition, edited by Henry Hughes, is a warm, witty, and wise collection of excellent verse in which some aspect of the angling passion, or some brooding over rivers, arises and plays itself out.

From Cloudbank Books: Oregon Book Award-winning poet Henry Hughes journeys with master artist Paul Gentry to explore Oregon and the state of America. They create a conversation that is moving, thoughtful, politically engaging and refreshingly playful

What people are saying about Shutter Lines:

“Henry Hughes is one of the great Northwest poets in top form, and now with Paul Gentry and his extraordinary photographs, we get an amazing, unforgettable collection.” —Willy Vlautin

“Photography, poetry, fiction, film—it’s all the same job—to find the right detail that says it all. The resonant details in Gentry’s photographs have leapt into Hughes’ fine writing, bringing people to life and those lives into sharp focus.” —Christopher Rauschenberg

“I like Steinbeck’s work, always have. America seen from close to the ground, nothing fancy, just real. That’s what I get out of Henry Hughes’ writing. Paul Gentry’s photos beautifully echo this writing—they seem to have a loneliness to them, a quietness, too.” —Rick Bartow

“The collaboration in Shutter Lines is so complete that the photographer has come to work like a poet and the poet like a photographer. This book is innovative, investigative, and insightful.” —David Biespiel

Ted Leeson makes the disclaimer that he is just a “seasonal resident” who for over twenty years has spent several weeks every summer living above and fishing the Madison River in southwest Montana. “And if my familiarity with the place runs only skin-deep, I am satisfied, for it is our skins that wrap us in sensation.” Leeson’s distance, humility, acute sensitivity and tail-flipping wit make Inventing Montana a fresh, humorous, and insightful book on a region that is reverently fished, camped, explored, and over-described. “Montana” is, after all, just “a word that closes distances, a name for a curved roof of sky and a place fashioned beneath it.”

“Collecting poetry from around the world, Hughes has assembled an anthology that not only portrays the differences of various fishing cultures, but of particular eras, whether it be ancient China or present day America.”

“Frank O’Hara’s call for poetry “better than the movies” suggests qualities of movement, vividness, clarity and music: a high standard, met by the poems of Moist Meridian. It won’t do to exaggerate the cinematic quality of the poems, with their flashes of narrative, rapid cuts, crisp dialogue, fresh characters; the kind of thinking and the language are those of a poet— and distinctively reflective poet. The compression and swift varying of mood are those of poetry, as in the opening sentence-fragment of “Black Walnuts,”: little charred brains/ on November streets, where folks from Hope House/ lurch and bump, run rain-suited/ down to Rick’s Coffee and the market,/ over-greeting the kind and idle.” Alertness, generosity, irony and candor govern these poems, which are endlessly curious about the relations among people, with sex, friendship, marriage and alienation examples of an abiding, fearful but engaging mystery. An engaging, uneasy and clear-sighted book.”